Wednesday, November 24, 2010

The code, while not completely re-factored, is running smoother than ever. Got rid of a lot of inefficient functions and combined a lot of work. The whole project needs a lot more optimisations, but I want to get back to actual gameplay improvements, as there are plenty more of those to go. This week, I added and finally decided to remove camera zooming (it was cool, but lost the 16 bit look I was going for), fixed camera scrolling, added player looking and wall slides and jumping.

Thursday, October 21, 2010

The main.lua file for my game has gotten a bit... bloated. 1500 lines isn't that big really, but its big enough and dense enough that I'm feeling the wear of searching through it for a particular line. It's time to re-write, and split some of it up into seperate files.

Time to work off some of that baby fat.

That's where I've been. Progress has been good, but I still have a ways to go before I'll have more "actual" updates on the game. I did add a (very) simple enemy AI system before I started on this project, so when the refactoring is finished, we should have some baddies pretty quickly.

Friday, October 15, 2010

Done! Managed to work through some boring, boring debugging, and the character movement is working better than ever. Besides special moves, like wall jumping or edge climbing, my little guy has everything he needs for now to move efficiently though a level. Think I'm ready to proceed to adding some enemies.

Today I worked for a few hours on composing some music using Pixel's Org Maker 2. Made good progress, but I'm having a serious problem with an excess of happiness in my tunes. Think it comes from only using major chords. I need to figure out how to get some spooky in there.

Thursday, October 14, 2010

I've hit a lull, and am trying to power through. I have some boring as dirt problems to solve, engine wise, before I can do much else. Making the art, sound and levels is fun and glamorous. This is not. Gonna beat it though.

Problems:

1) Hesitation when running from a flat surface to a slope

FIXED - the program thought that the slope was a tiny, tiny wall until horizontal momentum was 0 - fixed this by checking that the wall size was > a pixel before killing horizontal momentum.

2) Jumping while running up a slope: jumping straight up instead of up and forward, and only jumping half height

IN PROGRESS - think the character is hitting the slope, and getting slowed.

3) Jumping while running down a slope / touching ground inconsistancy

Think the problem is that I only have one variable for touching the ground. Need seperate checks: one for wheter character should be allowed to jump, which is more forgiving, and one for whether the character is actually, physically, touching the ground, which should be tougher. Probably need to make the character somehow "stick" to the ground while running down slopes. Right now he runs faster than the slope, so he's constantly falling, and unable to jump. HMMMM... ):|

In less boring-as-hell news, I've started making sounds for the game. Well. "Making" might be a stretch. "Randomly generating using CXFR" would probably be more accurate. At any rate:

Monday, October 11, 2010

It's funny how much time I'm spending on the little parts of this game. A tile-system took almost no time to implement. Character movement was done in 30 minutes. But making sure the character wouldn't continuously jump by holding down the jump key took about 3 hours (there are a surprising number of ways this scenario can happen), and adding dirt clods that fly when you jump or slide that are visible for all of 5 frames (less than half a second) has taken me two days.

I'd be worried about this except 1) I'm having a blast, and 2) I really think the little details are what separate a mediocre game from a truly excellent one. Thats not saying much, I know, except that maybe people can tell when you loved what you were working on.

To do:

smoother climb hills

- Still having a problem with character hesitating at transition between flat and sloped tiles.

Sunday, October 10, 2010

Just a short update, I've been working on a sprite system over the weekend, and am getting close to having it working. One of the hardest things about writing an engine, I'm discovering, is anticipating what needs I might have in the future for making a game. For now I just need small animations, like water, or e plosions, but later I'm sure I'll need particles, bullets and more. Learning to think ahead is definitely one of the biggest challenges of a project like this.

The character movement function is getting pretty refined. I still have a few bugs to work out, but my little skelly guy is moving pretty well. I think I need to do some "research" tommorow on some of my favorite sidescrollers, to make sure I'm not forgetting anything. Did someone say walljump?

Thursday, October 7, 2010

My name is Rick, and I go by drinkdecaf. I'm 29, and realizing that if I want to do the things I've always wanted to do, I'd better start actually doing them.

I've always wanted to make games. So I'm doing that.

My first project is a 2-D tile-based platformer engine / game. I'm writing it using the love engine, which is cheating, I'm pretty sure. Programming in Lua wont grow hair on your chest, but it will get you started, which is what I'm after right now -- gotta crawl before I can run.

I've made some good progress so far on the engine - it loads a collision sheet and a sprite sheet, has collision detection I wrote that actually works pretty well, and has pretty good physics for the player character. It's nowhere near being a "game" yet, but its been fun working on it a little each day and getting closer to something that might be fun to play.

Right now, I'm using Tiled to create the level / colision maps, so my next step, boring though it may be, is to write a parser that reads the .tmx Tiled files into my game automatically - I've checked, but no one seems to have written one of these for Lua, so its up to me, it seems.